No Hoorah please

[crutledge]

The following is a quote taken from a tutorial on ePub format.
http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp

<text>Chapter 1</text>

The stuff you type inside the text tag is what acutally shows up in the reading software's table of contents. This can be any text you want. (my emphasis)

The following is a header from Sigil.

I. The Company of the Marjolaine: Avignon 1759

The display in the toc is

I. The Company of the Marjolaine

It seems that any character other than [a-z] can screw up the toc.

Is there somewhere a list or an explanation of just what can be displayed in the toc.ncx <text>...</text> tag?

Or is it a matter of what each reader decides to do with toc.ncx?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by crutledge

The following is a quote taken from a tutorial on ePub format.
http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp



The following is a header from Sigil.

I. The Company of the Marjolaine: Avignon 1759

The display in the toc is

I. The Company of the Marjolaine

It seems that any character other than [a-z] can screw up the toc.

Is there somewhere a list or an explanation of just what can be displayed in the toc.ncx <text>...</text> tag?

Or is it a matter of what each reader decides to do with toc.ncx?

Certainly it seems that each reader does what it wants. For a specification you have to check DTBook for the details. The ePub format adopted the NCX file from the DTBook standard from DAISY and used it for their TOC standard. There is an NCX wiki entry and perhaps we can use that to flush out some of the issues.

First the TOC.NCX file is displayed outside the boundary of the book. By that I mean it is the reader program that displays it similar to how it displays the bookshelf. It will typically use the default font for the device so if the book has its own embedded font with special characters these will not be picked up in the TOC display. It is likely that the default parser is similar to a Unix command line parser and treats some characters in a special way.

Some readers such as Kobo (literati) and iBook does not nest the entries but lists them in a line. The PC version of ADE doesn't always handle the TOC at all well, sometimes truncating it. There are even readers that claim to read ePub that doesn't even process the TOC at all although as time progresses they are doing better. Cool Reader only recently started handling the TOC.

Dale